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Blenheim Palace June 6, 2008

Posted by dodo in : France, London, Museum, USA , trackback

Blenheim Palace was given by the British nation to John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, in recognition of his great victories over the armies of Louis XIV. Of these, the Battle of Blenheim on the Upper Danube, where he collaborated with Prince Eugene, was the first and most brilliant. In recent times, Blenheim has acquired added lustre from its association with Sir Winston Churchill, who was born there on November 30, 1874. The historical significance of Blenheim is matched by its architectural interest, for the palace represents the culmination of English Baroque, a style whose real value has only recently been recognised.

Soon after the news of Marlborough’s triumph on August 13, 1704, over the combined French and Bavarian armies at Blenheim, Queen Anne proposed that the royal manor of Woodstock near Oxford should be presented to the duke together with a palace to be built at royal expense with a splendour appropriate to the services of its occupant. We do not know how Queen Anne, not usually noted for her imagination, hit on this plan. Perhaps the idea was first hinted by her close friend and confidante Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who looked after her husband’s interests during his lengthy absences on the Continent. In the eventful history of the building of Blenheim Palace, Sarah was to be cast in a role that may be compared with that of the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Initially benevolent and reasonable, her breach with the queen in 1710 made her dour and shrewish. As an outspoken advocate of thrift she came to believe that ‘painters, poets and builders have very high flights, but they must be kept down’. In Sir John Vanbrugh, Blenheim’s chief architect, she met her match : for a decade the two fought a spectacular battle of wits which was abruptly ended by Vanbrugh’s resignation in a rage in 1716, though by then he had irrevocably fixed the pattern of the palace according to his own designs.

Travel GuidebookThe choice of Vanbrugh rather than Wren, who for some time had been recognised as the elder statesman of English architecture, seems capricious at first sight. Vanbrugh had begun his architectural career only five years earlier—in 1699—at the age of thirty-five. After an adventurous life as an army officer and traveller (on one of his journeys in France he was thrown into the Bastille as a spy), Vanbrugh electrified the London scene in 1696 with his witty comedy The Relapse, which he had put together in a mere six weeks. Three years later he unexpectedly accepted a commission to design Castle Howard in Yorkshire. The irascible Dean Swift probably voiced the disapproval of a good many sensible people at this sudden shift when he remarked:

`Van’s genius, without thought or lecture, Is hugely turned to architecture.’

In this first building venture, however, Vanbrugh showed extraordinary adroitness by associating with himself Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had served as Wren’s assistant for a number of years. Hawksmoor had by far the most solid technical grounding of any English architect of the day, coupled with a highly individual inventive gift. He had, however, a retiring and ‘peculiar’ personality: as one of his clients later remarked, he had ‘never talk’d with a man so little prejudiced in favour of his own performances’. Hawksmoor’s

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Blenheim Palace

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